Oscar Buynevich
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...Consider who Rubio is comfortable putting in charge of the summit, names I gleaned from an internal State Department roster detailing the event.
Tera Dahl, a senior advisor in State’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, is a Michael Flynn colleague from the first Trump administration who was pushed out of the National Security Council by H.R. McMaster. Before that, she wrote for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, co-founded the now-defunct Council on Global Security — a think tank devoted to warning about the dangers of Islam. There, she worked with Katharine Gorka, wife of current Trump terrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, authoring a string of pieces praising Egypt’s strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for “leading Egypt towards democracy” as he jailed his critics.
Dahl got her start as a staffer for then-Representative Michele Bachmann — which is its own kind of full circle. In 2012, Bachmann and four House colleagues sent letters to federal inspectors general alleging that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the U.S. government, singling out longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The claim was baseless enough that John McCain went to the Senate floor to rebuke a member of his own party.
Then there’s Monica Jacobsen, another senior official at State’s Counterrorism Bureau, a holy warrior who emphasizes the defense of global Christians. She testified to Congress this year that her agency would “hold governments’ feet to the fire when they fail to address terrorist threats that undermine religious freedom.”
Then there’s Brent Munyon, Senior Adviser to the Deputy Secretary of Management and Resources. A few years ago, he was a partisan dirt digger for the Republican National Committee. Finally, there’s Oscar Buynevich, Special Advisor for the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, another partisan commentator whose career amounted to shoveling culture war slop at right-wing campus watchdogs like Campus Reform and The College Fix.
It’s a rogues’ gallery befitting the imaginary Iraqi WMD fiasco, the main contributor to the mess we are still in more than 20 years later. Think Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle.
Welcome to Rubio 2028.
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AI Overview
Oscar Buynevich is a former student correspondent for Campus Reform, a conservative higher education watchdog project run by the Leadership Institute, where he reported on campus safety and administrative issues. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Background and Media Work
- Worked as a student correspondent for Campus Reform while attending Temple University.
- Appeared on conservative media platforms like Real America's Voice to discuss public safety and crime concerns affecting college campuses. [1, 2]
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Coalition for Independent Technology Research says ...
The GOP- led committee “won't let unelected bureaucrats waste taxpayer dollars censoring speech or pushing anti- American ideology abroad,” Mast ...Read more
The Coalition for Independent Technology Research says the US State Department is engaged in a 'brazen and far-reaching campaign of censorship' targeting researchers and anti-disinformation advocates
A group of technology researchers filed a lawsuit on Monday alleging that US President Donald Trump’s administration has adopted an unconstitutional policy that targets foreign nationals who study disinformation and hate speech on social media for visa denials and deportation.
The San Francisco-based Coalition for Independent Technology Research in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington argues that the administration’s policy unlawfully chills the work of non-citizen researchers in the United States.
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The group said the US State Department, while claiming it is fighting online censorship that Trump’s allies have argued has affected conservative speech on social media, is engaged in a “brazen and far-reaching campaign of censorship” targeting researchers and anti-disinformation advocates.
The lawsuit asks a judge to block the policy on the grounds that it violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment protections for free speech, Fifth Amendment promise of due process as well as requirements under a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act.
“The Trump administration is using the threat of detention and deportation to suppress speech it disfavors,” Carrie DeCell, a lawyer for the coalition at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement.
A State Department spokesperson said in a statement that the United States “is under no obligation to admit or suffer the presence of individuals who subvert our laws and deny our citizens their constitutional rights.”
The administration has made free speech, particularly what it sees as the stifling of conservative voices online, a focus of its foreign policy, including in Brazil and in Europe.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a visa ban on foreign nationals “complicit in censoring Americans.” Rubio said some foreign officials have engaged in “flagrant censorship actions against US tech companies and US citizens and residents when they have no authority to do so.”
In December, the State Department imposed visa bans on five Europeans, including a former European Union commissioner and anti-disinformation activists who Rubio called “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex.”
The department did so after EU tech regulators that month fined Elon Musk’s social media company X 120 million euros ($140 million) in the first sanction imposed under the EU’s landmark Digital Services Act, which is intended to combat hateful speech, misinformation and disinformation.
Among the five hit by the visa ban were Imran Ahmed, the British CEO of the US-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index. Their groups are members of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, the lawsuit said. – Rappler.com
justthe news
...ng further than the Treasury Department's tacit support for debanking alleged "hate groups" after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, a State Department component that "strengthen[s] resilient democratic societies" developed a more sweeping plan for financially choking off disfavored narratives a month later.
The U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a "Disinformation Primer" that appears to have been started in "late 2020," judging by a reference to the most up-to-date "social media initiatives" by Facebook and Twitter "to address disinformation and misinformation."
It was still being written at least 10 days into the Biden administration, referring twice to the Jan. 31, 2021 Myanmar military coup, which the primer says "underlined issues of internet freedom and disinformation."
State turned over the 88-page document, dated February 2021 and marked "internal use only," as part of a 102-page production in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation by America First Legal.
The primer was "conceived and developed by Joshua Machleder and Shannon Maguire at USAID, together with" the University of Chicago organization formerly known as the National Opinion Research Center, the introduction says.
It thanks dozens of individuals at universities and government institutions including the National Endowment for Democracy and U.S. Institute for Peace "for sharing their time, opinions, and expertise," and current and former USAID staff for "opinions and feedback."
USAID didn't respond to requests for comment on its view of the primer now.
"Just as human rights advocates have argued that internet access is a human right and that there is a fundamental right to access of information, there is also a right not to be disinformed," the primer says in a section laying out 10 steps for USAID and partners to take in "countering and preventing disinformation."
These include partnering with other governments, supporting "media monitoring and fact-checking initiatives," and "form[ing] synergies" with "civil society, media, social media platforms, internet governance forums, and other donors" to prevent disinformation, especially working with "data scientists, social scientists, and journalists."
miller?
AFL gave the FOIA production to the Foundation for Freedom Online, which published an analysis Thursday by executive director and former State communications official Mike Benz, managing director Allum Bokhari and graduate student Oscar Buynevich.
The primer mentions "advertising" 19 times and advertisers or advertisements a dozen times, showing USAID support for the "well-established tactic of the censorship industry – financial blacklisting," FFO's analysis says.
While much of the report promotes the more-speech-is-better approach, such as funding local journalism, a section on "supply-side responses" – written in the passive tense – implies both governments and activists should pressure advertisers to flee alleged sources of disinformation.
Most advertisers are "unaware of the disinformation risk of the domains featuring their ads due to the automated process of ad placement," the "Advertiser Outreach" subsection says.
"Thus, cutting this financial support found in the ad-tech space would obstruct disinformation actors from spreading messaging online," it says. "Efforts have been made to inform advertisers of their risks, such as the threat to brand safety by being placed next to objectionable content, through conducting research and assessments of online media content."
While the primer says it provides examples of advertiser outreach in an annex on "emerging solutions," none of the examples explicitly mentions advertising. The annex does include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's public awareness campaign about pineapple on pizza.
FFO highlighted the primer's support for the supply-side "Redirect Method," piloted by Moonshot and Google's Jigsaw in 2016, "an open-source methodology that uses targeted advertising" on platforms such as Google Adwords "to connect people searching online for harmful content with constructive alternative messages."
It was used to "target individuals susceptible to ISIS radicalization via recruiting measures" and "is being adapted in several countries to combat vaccine hesitancy and hate speech," the primer says.
The Redirect Method is a "precursor" to Google's "prebunking" initiative, which the Alphabet-owned company said last year it was expanding into Germany and India, FFO said. Prebunking is based on inoculation theory, which treats disfavored narratives as a virus.
FFO notes the primer touts the work of former Harvard misinformation researcher and Hunter Biden laptop truther Joan Donovan, who advocates prebunking.
Comedian Jon Stewart publicly challenged Donovan's work and former Facebook policy chief Eliot Schrage reportedly did so privately as a Harvard Kennedy School adviser, both questioning who gets to decide what counts as "disinformation."
USAID separately thanked State's Global Engagement Center staff for "their review and feedback."
GEC has funded and promoted internet games that teach children to view populism as disinformation – a form of prebunking – and promote "social justice."
It also funded the Global Disinformation Index, which pressures advertisers to cut off alleged sources of disinformation, predominantly conservative publishers – drawing the ire of congressional Republicans and a lawsuit by two publishers.
The primer calls for targeting "gaming sites," including Amazon-owned Twitch, because "problematic information more regularly originates from networks of alternative sites and anonymous individuals" than from state actors.
USAID put scare quotes around "mainstream" twice to describe sources outside of gaming communities. While these "conspiracy theories may seem farcical or preposterous to an outsider," the primer warns, mainstream sources covering gaming communities "may unknowingly provide wide coverage of misleading information."
The primer also puts scare quotes around "research" to describe gamers taking the initiative to educate themselves, "collectively reviewing and validating each other to create a populist expertise that justifies, shapes and supports their alternative beliefs."
Malinformation, sometimes described as true but inconvenient, also makes an appearance in the primer. It's defined as "deliberate publication of private information for personal or private interest" that is "taken out of context," as well as the "deliberate manipulation of genuine content" and "hate speech."
Memes are "a common means" for malinformation to spread, the primer warns. "[T]he most effective are humorous or critical of society ... but researchers note they also can be dangerous."
The supply-side section acknowledges the "inherent contradiction between the democratic ideal of free speech and the regulation of online content" and warns that democracies that pass anti-disinformation laws can embolden "authoritarians" to do the same.
One way to have their cake and eat it too is for democracies to adopt "co-regulatory models" such as the "industry-led Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and the government-led Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs)," the primer says.
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Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, released in 2019. Oscar Buynevich writes for the Foundation for Freedom Online. was a contributor to Red Alert Politics.
US Politics : Old Age Home Shenanigans | Page 140
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